London Bar Fight

Afghan Whigs singer Greg Dulli came away from a fight in a London hotel last Tuesday night (Feb. 6) with the spectacular black eye pictured above. “You should see the other guy,” he told the Maker’s David Bennun. “I got into it with an Irish guy. He was disrespecting some women in the bar and I told him to apologize. He told me to fuck off. I told him to fuck off. He punched me and I picked up a chair and I beat him with it until he stopped moving. Then the ambulance came and took him to the hospital, I suppose.”
When Bennun remarked that chivalry was not dead, Whigs bassist John Curley, who was present at the fracas, replied, “The Irish guy might be, though.”

Added Dulli: “I’m half-Irish myself, and he found out that half’s enough. He should be glad that the Greek half didn’t go into action. He would have found his pants down around his ankles for starters. I’d have made him baa like a sheep.”

Dulli has also given the Maker a track-by-track account of the new Afghan Whigs LP, “Black Love”, released by Mute on March 11:

* “Crime Scene Part One”: “There was a girl, I didn’t really know her that well, who had a really good job, she lived in New York, and committed suicide last fall. Knowing her peripherally, I decided to write her side of the story. That crossed with this screenplay by my friend Nicholas called ‘The Million Dollar Hotel’ that’s going to be directed by Wim Wenders. The first scene of the movie starts with a guy jumping off a building. So I kind of juxtaposed the two.”

* “My Enemy”: “A composite of three or four people that I used to be friends with and I’m -ah- not friends with anymore.”

* “Double Day” : “I had a bit of an agoraphobic stage starting last winter that lasted till spring. A lot of paranoia. I think, basically, I took the four or five months and tried to make it rhyme.”

* “Blame, etc.”: “This is the story of David Ruffin in four minutes.”

* “Step into the Light” : “I basically wanted to write a straight love song without any hidden irony or any sinister undercurrents. Something straight and sweet that basically said, “You’re gone and I miss you’. No vinegar.”

* “Going to Town”: “A boy goes to pick up his girlfriend. They get a couple of cans of gasoline and throw ’em in the trunk. They drive into town, they douse the place with gas, light it on fire, then they drive off into the country to have sex.”

*”Honky’s Ladder” : “The ultimate tale of confrontational revenge fantasies coming to life. I went to public school, but on Saturdays I went to Catholic school. My best friend at the catechism class was named Adam Billingsley, he was a black kid. I used to go over to his house after school. This was the first time I had ever hung around an all-black neighborhood and heard the fact that black people talked differently to the way white people did. One of the insults they had was ‘You’re climbing honky’s ladder’. I always liked that it was the biggest insult one black man could say to another.

* “Night by Candlelight” : “It’s a person by themselves having a dialogue with themselves and asking questions about what kind of person they are”

* “Bulletproof” : “We had a very intense late 94/early 95 where a whole lot of stuff hit us, made us kinda paranoid, probably made me a bit agoraphobic in the first place. This was the rallying cry.’Bulletproof’ implies resiliance”

* “Summer’s Kiss” : “It’s about a girl that I knew in Seattle, and the three-month affair that we had.”

* “Faded”: “In a nutshell, ‘Layla’ meets ‘Purple Rain’.”

“Honky’s Ladder” will be released as a single on Feb 10 with “Blame, Etc.” and two covers: “If I Only Had a Heart” and “Creep”.